Hello. Hola. Bonjour. Ni Hao. We all say things differently because each language has their own words. Like, duh. But what about how different languages think animals sound? We’re not exactly saying words as much as we are simply enunciating simple sounds and yet, different languages have their own take on each animal sound too.
The video asks people who speak English, Mandarin, French, Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Hindi, Japanese, Russian, Dutch, Bengali, Swahili, etc. how they think a dog, cat, rooster, cow and a pig sound and it’s surprising how different it can get. Mostly everybody agrees on what a cat sounds like but when it comes to roosters and pigs, it’s a crapshoot. Who’s most right?
The next ambassador to the northeast African nation of Ethiopia, which was the only African nation to successfully maintain its independence during the Age of Empire, will be Patricia Haslach. If confirmed by the Senate, Haslach would succeed Donald Booth, who served in Addis Ababa from 2009 to 2012. In her most recent position, Haslach served as principal deputy assistant secretary in the State Department’s newest bureau, the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, starting January 24, 2013.
Born in Rockville Center, New York, in 1956, Haslach moved with her family to Lake Oswego, Oregon in 1971. Her father, Frank Haslach, was an asset and recovery manager for Evans Products and Oregon Bank. She graduated St. Mary’s Academy in 1974, earned her B.A. in Political Science at Gonzaga University in 1978, and her M.A. in International Affairs at Columbia University in 1981.
Haslach began her career with the federal government in 1986 as an agricultural attaché with the Foreign Agricultural Service at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, assigned to India from 1987 to 1990. Transferring to the State Department as an economic officer, she was posted to the U.S. Mission to the European Union managing assistance to the Group of 24 countries. In the years following, Haslach served as resource officer at the embassies in Jakarta, Indonesia, and in Lagos, Nigeria. From 2000 to May 2002, she served as economic counselor at the embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, while her husband, David Herbert was the embassy’s general services officer. As Pakistan became part of the front line in President George W. Bush’s war against Islamic terrorism, Haslach gave up her post to move her two daughters back to the United States..
In her next stateside post as director of the Office of Afghanistan Reconstruction from 2002-2004, Haslach oversaw the multi-billion-dollar reconstruction program intended to fix some of the damage caused by war. Haslach then served two straight stints as an ambassador, first as ambassador to Laos from 2004 to 2007, and then as ambassador to the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum, headquartered in Singapore, from 2007 to 2009.
She served as assistant chief of mission for assistance transition at the embassy in Baghdad, Iraq, from July 2009 to June 2010, and as deputy coordinator for diplomacy for the U.S. Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative from June 2010 to March 2011. From then until late 2012, Haslach was the State Department’s coordinator for Iraq transition in the Office of the Deputy Secretary for Management and Resources.
Patricia Haslach has two adult daughters, Shereen and Kiran Herbert.
Many people living outside Africa, most perhaps, have never heard of the Ogaden (or Somali) region of Ethiopia, they know nothing of the murders rapes and destruction that the ethnic Somali’s allege are taking place there. We all have our problems and what can I do anyway, these governments are corrupt, we – meaning western governments shouldn’t be sending them money, especially now with all the public sector cuts taking place. So runs the uninformed, albeit understandable response.
I like it here in Dadaab, “it’s peaceful”, seven year-old, Khandra Abdi told me. Do you have lots of friends? “No, what would I do with a friend…. I have an imaginary friend called Roho, she is also seven years old.” Khandra had seen her mother and other women tortured, when, as an innocent child, of an innocent mother, she was imprisoned in the regional capital Jijiga, in the infamous Jail Ogaden, with its torture rooms and underground cells. Whilst in prison, Sahro received no medical treatment for the “wounds” sustained when she was violently arrested, and was detained without charge “for three years with my daughter”. Throughout that time she says, soldiers repeatedly gang raped, beat and tortured her. The soldiers “kept a record of the girls and women they want to rape. Women that resist or refuse are beaten, then raped and then raped again and again.” Resistance then, is futile in a world devoid of common humanity and the rule of law.
In the end “they let me go because my wounds had become infected and I could not be used [raped] by the soldiers anymore”. The military get rid of the women Saro says, when they are no more use to them. The arrests are arbitrary, so too the release.
After her release, in fear of her life and of her daughter’s safety, she set off, with no funds on the arduous journey to Kenya, aiming for Dadaab. With Khandra, she “firstly travelled by camel – given to me by my brother, to Danod in Wardheer. This took approximately 15 days. My brother gave me food to cook on the way and some money. Then I got a lift in a lorry to the Kenyan border.”
It’s an arid land inhabited by around five million people. Mainly pastoralists, they live simple lives tending their cattle and moving along ancestral pathways. Most have never been to school, cannot read or write and live hard but honest lives in tune with the land and the past.
There is natural gas and oil under the Ogaden or is it Ethiopian soil, first discovered when the Italians, under the dictator Benito Mussolini occupied Ethiopia for nine years.in the 1930’s.
Sahro, emotionally scarred and looking older than her 36 years, uneducated and desperately poor, she earned “some little money by making and selling tea to the villagers and pastoralists who came to the village”. The Ethiopian military and their paramilitary partners, the Liyuu police patrol the region, not all of it just the five targeted states. They move from base to village recruiting young men often at gunpoint, raping women, looting and burning homes, local people tell us. They work in five-day cycles, five on, five off, time is needed to recover I suppose, from the activities of the working week.
One evening the Ethiopian military descended upon Danod, a settlement in the district of Wardheer, where Sahro lived “in a tent… with two sisters and my daughter. I was divorced from the children’s father.” The military accused her of the heinous crime of making tea for the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF). Rebel group, or freedom fighters, depending on your viewpoint, that since their inauguration in 1984 have been calling for self-determination, politically, when they made up 60% of the regional government, and post 1994, militarily and politically.
The night Sahro was arrested they took her, “with Khandra into the forest and they tried to rape me. I fought them and ran from them, the soldiers shot at me, hitting me in the leg [shows me her scar] and hand [missing finger on right hand] and I fell to the ground. There were four soldiers chasing me, and many more in the village.” It’s hard for a woman with a child to fight off four soldiers and “many more in the village”. Bundled into a car she was driven to Jijiga and incarcerated.
People from the region fleeing government persecution, are not automatically granted refugee status, instead they are required to pass through an assessment process, undertaken by The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) ‘Refugee determination Unit’. An official position that, given the level of state criminality, in my view, warrants re-evaluating. UNHCR have limited resources and filling forms often takes months, adding up to years in some cases. Three separate sites make up the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, with a total population of close to 500,000 – a small city, it is the largest refugee camp in the world. UNHCR manages it and gives basic support – shelter, blankets food and water rations to the people seeking refuge that knock on their door.
Many that arrive in Dadaab make the journey to the Kenyan border on foot, often walking in intense heat over harsh landscape for months: 40 year old Fadumu Siyad, arrived in Dadaab in August 2012 after walking for two months ”from Saga to Ceelbarda. It is a very long way; we used to walk all day and all night. At first we cooked food we carried with us, but after a month the food was finished, then we looked for pastoralists who helped us by giving us food and milk. I was walking with my three young children”, – a girl aged 14 and two boys aged 10 and 7 yrs. Another woman I met, walked with her two small children, she would carry one for 20 meters, put her down then go back for the other one. She did this for three months, until she reached the Kenya. The physical and indeed mental strength of such women is to be admired.
The inculcation of fear lies at the heart of the military methodology, “the first mission for all the military and the Liyuu is to make the people of the Ogaden region afraid of us”, said Dahhir, a divisional commander in the Liyuu force. In keeping with acts of (state) terrorism, he was told and dutifully carried out his orders, “to rape and kill, to loot, to burn their homes, and capture their animals – we used to slaughter some of the animals we captured, eat some and some we sold back to their owners.”
Rape, a weapon of war for centuries, is (allegedly) a favourite tool used by the Ethiopian forces to terrify and intimidate the people of the Ogaden, and we are told other parts of the country, Gambella and Oromo for example. In the safety of the UNHCR compound, a huge enclosure reminiscent of a French campsite, I met 18-year old Hoden on my first day in Dadaab. Dressed in a long black headscarf, she looked fragile and shy. We sat with Ahmed the translator, in a small portakabin the air conditioning on, surrounded by desks and she slowly began to answer my awkward questions.
She cried a lot as she told me her upsetting story. Brought up in Fiqq town, her family of pastoralists moved to Gode after her mother was arrested when she was 16. It was in Gode that she too was imprisoned, held for six months, caned, tortured and “raped every night by gangs of soldiers”. She was a frightened, innocent 17-year old child then, today she is a wounded, lonely mother with a one-year old baby girl – the result of one of the rapes.
Notions of Identity and freedom lie at the heart of the political and military struggle for autonomy from Ethiopia, who many regard as a foreign occupying force. The view from Addis Ababa is, unsurprisingly, somewhat different. The Government and most Ethiopians see the Ogaden as part of the federal state of Ethiopia, albeit a part given to them by the British. A detail, that whilst historically correct, is for the time being at least, largely irrelevant. The ONLF, heroes to the ethnic Somali’s, are seen by the Ethiopian regime as a band of unlawful terrorists, causing mayhem in the region, that the brave soldiers of the military, serving their country well, are trying to capture.
As the T word has now surfaced, perhaps at this point it’s worth repeating the definition of terrorism found in The US Department of Defense Dictionary of Military Terms. It is, they say “The calculated use of unlawful violence or threat of unlawful violence to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological”. So that would cover the rape and murder of civilians, the destruction of residential property, torture, false arrests and arbitrary executions, all of which are – we must say ‘it is alleged’, being carried out by the Ethiopian military, actions that (if true) earn the EPRDF government the international accolade of ‘State Terrorist’. An appropriate title that sits uncomfortably with the EPRDF’s democratic pretensions and the cozy relationship enjoyed with their western allies and principle donors. Western governments, who we must assume know well the level of state criminality being committed, and, to their utter shame, say nothing in support of the human rights of the people of Ethiopia.
Distressingly Hoden, is now “stigmatized amongst her own people” within Dadaab, for “having a child from an Ethiopian soldier“. Such are the narrow minded, judgmental attitudes that pervade such communities and destroy the lives of countless women, young and old. At the end of our time together, Hoden said, her “future has been ruined”. She lowered her head as she gently wept, and we sat together in silence.
Driven overwhelmingly by self-interest and profit, the current crop of “investors” differ little from their colonial ancestors.
India’s Karuturi in Ethiopia
The New Wild West
Dancing to the tune of their corporate benefactors, governments of the ruling G8 countries are enacting complex agriculture agreements delivering large tracts of prime cut African soil into the portfolios of their multinational bedmates.
Desperate for foreign investment, countries throughout Africa are at the mercy of their new colonial masters – national and international agrochemical corporations, fighting for land, water and control of the world’s food supplies. Driven overwhelmingly by self-interest and profit, the current crop of ‘investors’ differ little from their colonial ancestors. The means may have changed, but the aim – to rape and pillage, no matter the sincere sounding rhetoric, remains more or less the same.
Regarded by her northern guides as agriculturally underperforming, Sub-Saharan Africa is seen The African Centre for Bio-diversity (ACB) relate, as a “new frontier”, a place to “make profits, with an eye on land, food and biofuels in particular”. Africa, then, is the new Wild West; smallholder farmers and indigenous people are the natives Indians, the multi nationals and their democratically elected representatives – or salesmen – the settlers.
Various initiatives offering what is, indisputably, much needed ‘support and investment’ flowing north to south. Key amongst these is The New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition in Africa (NAFSNA), designed by the governments of the eight richest economies, for some of the poorest countries in the world. The New Alliance was born out of the G8 summit in May 2012 at Camp David and, according to, War on Want (WoW), “has been modelled on the ‘new vision’ of private investment in agriculture developed by management consultants McKinsey in conjunction with the ABCD group of leading grain traders (ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus) and other multinational agribusiness companies.” (Ibid) It has been written in honourable terms to sit comfortably within the Africa Union’s Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Programme (CAADP), bestowing an aura of international credibility.
The New Alliance… in land and seed appropriation
At first glance, The New Alliance, with its altruistically-gilded aims, appears to be a worthy development. Who amongst us could argue with the intention as reported by the United Nations (UN), to “achieve sustained and inclusive agricultural growth and raise 50 million people out of poverty over the next 10 years”. The means to achieving this noble quest however, are skewed, ignoring the rights and needs of small-holder farmers and the wishes of local people – who are not consulted during the heady negotiations with government officials local and national, and the multi zillion $ corporations who are swarming to buy their ancestral land. Alliance contracts and deals-done favour wealthy investors, revealing the underlying, unjust G8 initiatives objective, to “open up African agriculture to multinational agribusiness companies by means of national ‘cooperation frameworks’ between African governments, donors and private sector investors”, WoW report.
Poverty reduction (the principle stated aim of the Alliance), will be achieved we are told, not by rational methods of sharing and re-distribution, but USAID 05/18/2012 reveal, by “aligning the commitments of Africa’s leadership to drive effective country plans and policies for food security”. ‘Plans and policies’, drafted no doubt in the hallowed meeting rooms of those driving the ‘New Alliance’: the G8 governments and their cohorts including The World Bank and, pulling the policy strings, the agriculture companies sitting behind them, nestling alongside the pharmaceutical giants and the arms industry magnates. With African governments anxious to eat at the head table, or at least be invited into the cocktail chamber they have little choice but to sign up to such unbalanced ‘plans and policies’.
To date, nine African countries (from a continent of 54 nation states), have committed to The New Alliance. First to sign up were, Tanzania, Ghana and the West’s favoured ally in the region Ethiopia – where wide ranging human rights violations, including forced displacement and rapes have reportedly accompanied land sales, and where over 250,000 people in Gambella have been forced into the Orwellian sounding ‘Villagization Programmes’. Then came Burkina Faso, Mozambique and Cote d’Ivoire, followed by Benin, Malawi, and Nigeria. It is an agreement dripping with strings that promise to entangle the innocent and uninformed. After “wide-ranging consultations on land and farming”, with officials from potential partner countries, the results of which were “ignored in the agreements with the G8”, deals “between African governments and private companies were facilitated by the World Economic Forum”, behind, The Guardian report, firmly closed doors.
Conditional to investment promised by The New Alliance, African leaders, USAID tell us are ‘committed’ – forced may be a better word – “to refine [government] policies in order to improve investment opportunities”. In plain English, African countries are required to, change their trade and agriculture laws to include ending the free distribution of seeds, relax the tax system and national export controls and open the doors for profit repatriation (allowing the money as well as the crops to be exported). In Mozambique, as elsewhere across the continent, local farmers have been evicted from their land under land sales agreements, and The Guardian 06/10/2013 report, “is now obliged to write new laws promoting what its agreement calls “partnerships” of this kind”. A polluted term, disguising the real relationship between African governments and the multi-national ‘investors’, which is closer to master and maid than equal collaborators.
The Alliance offers a combination of public and private money to African countries willing to take the G8 plunge into international political-economic duplicity, with, ACB relate “the large multinational seed, fertiliser and agrochemical companies setting the agenda … and philanthropic institutions (like AGRA and others) establishing the institutional and infrastructural mechanisms to realise this agenda”. Britain has pledged £395 million of foreign aid whilst, according to the UN “over 45 local and multinational companies have expressed their intent to invest over $3 billion across the agricultural value chain in Grow Africa countries [a Programme of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) established by the African Union in 2003.].” In order to get their hands on some of the corporations billions however, African nations are required to “change their seed laws, trade laws and land ownership in order to prioritise corporate profits over local food needs”, Mozambique e.g. is contracted, The Guardian tell us to “systematically cease distribution of free and unimproved seeds”, and is drawing up new laws granting intellectual property rights (IPR) of seeds, that will “promote private sector investment”. In other words, laws are being written that allow foreign companies – ‘investors’ (a word used to mislead and bestow legitimacy) – to grab the land of their African ‘partners’, patent their seeds and monopolise their food markets. In Ghana, Tanzania and Ivory Coast, similar regulations sit on the table waiting to be rubber-stamped.
The re-writing of seed laws, along with the fact that these unbalanced deals allow “big multinational seed, fertiliser and agrochemical companies such as Yara, Monsanto, Syngenta and Cargill to set the agenda”, is a major concern expressed by environmental NGO’s and campaigners, Reuters 06/20/2013 report. These are concerns that the initiating G8 governments, were they at all troubled by the impact of their meddling, should share.
The wide ownership, by a small number of huge agro-chemical companies of the rights to seeds and fertilisers, is creating, the UN in their report on the Right to Food, state: “monopoly privileges to plant breeders and patent-holders through the tools of intellectual property”. This growing trend, facilitated through the support of the G8 governments is placing more and more control of the worldwide food supply in their hands, and is causing, “the poorest farmers [to] become increasingly dependent on expensive inputs, creating the risk of indebtedness in the face of unstable incomes.” India is a case in question where farmers strangled by debt are committing suicide at a rate of two per hour.
Investment Support Sharing
African farmers, and civil society along with 25 British campaign groups including War on Want, Friends of the Earth, The Gaia Foundation and the World Development Movement, have declared their objections to the New Alliance and asked that the government withhold the £395 million so generously pledged by Prime Minister Cameron. The African civil society are in no doubt that “opening markets and creating space for multinationals to secure profits lie at the heart of the G8 intervention”, they “recognise the New Alliance is a poisoned chalice, and they are right to reject it”, asserts Kirtana Chandrasekaran of Friends of the Earth (FoE).
Having made a continental mess of their own countries’ economies, not to mention the environmental mayhem caused by their neo-liberal economic policies, It is with unabashed colonial arrogance that the G8 governments deem to tell African countries what to do with their land and how best to do it. Not only do they have no genuine interest in Africa, save what can be gained from it, but they have “no legitimacy to intervene in matters of food, hunger and land tenure in Africa or any other part of the world”, as WoW make clear. The New Alliance, according to David Cameron, is “a great combination of promoting good governance and helping Africa to feed its people”. He and the rest of the G8 sitting comfortably club, are, FoE state, “pretending to be tackling hunger and land grabbing in Africa while backing a scheme that will ruin the lives of hundreds of thousands of small farmers”. This new deal is “a pro-corporate assault on African nations”, providing ‘investment and support‘ opportunities for greedy investors, looking to further expand their corporate assets with the support of participating governments obliged to provide a selection box of state incentives.
The ending of hunger in sub-Saharan Africa, India and elsewhere, will not be brought about by allowing large tracts of land to be bought up by corporations whose only interest is in maximizing return on investment. Far from providing investment and support for the people of Africa, The Alliance is a mask for exploitation and profiteering: True investment in Africa is investment in the people of Africa; the smallholder farmers, the women and children, the communities across the continent. It involves working collectively, consulting, encouraging participation and crucially sharing. Sharing of knowledge, experience and technology, sharing the natural resources – the land, food and water, the minerals and other resources equitably amongst the people of Africa and indeed the wider world. Such radical, commonsense ideas would go a long way to creating not only food security but harmony, trust and social justice which just might bring about peace.
Ethiopia were stripped of three points in World Cup qualifying by FIFA on Monday for fielding an ineligible player in a game against Botswana, handing South Africa a lifeline for next year’s tournament in Brazil.
FIFA said Ethiopia forfeited their 2-1 win in Botswana on June 8 because Minyahile Beyene played in that game when he was suspended for receiving two yellow cards in earlier qualifiers. FIFA has awarded the match to Botswana 3-0.
The sanction means Ethiopia are now only two points ahead of South Africa and three ahead of Botswana and not guaranteed a place in Africa’s final playoffs for the World Cup ahead of the final round of Group A games in September.
FIFA’s disciplinary committee also fined Ethiopia’s federation $6,348.
Administrative blunder
The Ethiopian Football Federation is unlikely to appeal the punishment having already admitted that Minyahile should not have played in Botswana.
Minyahile was allowed to play because of an administrative blunder where officials “forgot” he was suspended, the federation said.
Ethiopia went on to beat South Africa 2-1 at home in their latest game on June 16 and thought then that they had qualified for the 10-team playoffs, which will decide Africa’s five countries at the World Cup in Brazil. Ethiopia have never played at the World Cup.
However, FIFA opened disciplinary proceedings against Ethiopia over Minyahile on the same day they joyously celebrated their progress.
South Africa, the 2010 World Cup hosts, are on eight points and at home to Botswana in the final round of games on September 6. Ethiopia, now on 10 points, face an away game against Central African Republic, which could be played in neutral territory because of ongoing unrest in the country.
Botswana, now with seven points, have an outside chance of qualifying for the playoffs if they beat South Africa and Ethiopia lose to Central African Republic, which cannot qualify.
FIFA also is investigating two other African countries – Togo and Equatorial Guinea – for allegedly fielding ineligible players in World Cup qualifying, which could throw two other groups into chaos.
Togo could forfeit their 2-0 win over Cameroon in Group I, which would put Cameroon above Libya and in pole position to take that group’s spot in the playoffs.
Equatorial Guinea could forfeit points to Cape Verde in Group B, meaning Tunisia’s progress to the playoffs is not yet certain.
2172 House Rayburn Office Building Washington, DC 20515
Chairman Smith on the hearing: “Ethiopia is a vital American ally in Africa, but its human rights and democracy policies fall short of the basic rights that Ethiopians deserve. Our hearing will look at the policies of the current Ethiopian government in hopes that it will better accommodate political opposition and civil society, and respect the rights of all Ethiopians. We also need to consider how the U.S. Government can support ways to improve the rights—and lives—of the Ethiopian people.”
Witnesses
Panel I
The Honorable Donald Y. Yamamoto
Acting Assistant Secretary of State
Bureau of African Affairs
U.S. Department of State
The Honorable Earl W. Gast
Assistant Administrator
Bureau for Africa
U.S. Agency for International Development
Panel II
Berhanu Nega, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Economics
Bucknell University
J. Peter Pham, Ph.D.
Director
Michael S. Ansari Africa Center
Atlantic Council
Mr. Obang Metho
Executive Director
Solidarity Movement for a New Ethiopia
Mr. Adotei Akwei
Managing Director for Government Relations
Amnesty International USA
